As near as Adams can tell, these manipulators have some kind of mind meld that lets them know exactly when to buy and sell stocks, en masse

not mind meld, just a series of dedicated computers and custom databases, along with a super secret proprietary algorithm that gives them an 'inside track' on the market and one hell of an advantage over everyone else.

or, in other words, Goldman-Sachs. so while Adams might sound a bit crazy...do some digging for yourselves. there are a couple players in the market who almost never lose a bet.

Weaver95:As near as Adams can tell, these manipulators have some kind of mind meld that lets them know exactly when to buy and sell stocks, en masse

not mind meld, just a series of dedicated computers and custom databases, along with a super secret proprietary algorithm that gives them an 'inside track' on the market and one hell of an advantage over everyone else.

or, in other words, Goldman-Sachs. so while Adams might sound a bit crazy...do some digging for yourselves. there are a couple players in the market who almost never lose a bet.

This.Even crazy people can be intuitive, and the stock market is a game played very well by a handful of powerful companies. Not so much by the average investor.Its not beyond reason that the big boys could take us for a ride to make themselves a great profit at everyone else's expense.

Weaver95:As near as Adams can tell, these manipulators have some kind of mind meld that lets them know exactly when to buy and sell stocks, en masse

not mind meld, just a series of dedicated computers and custom databases, along with a super secret proprietary algorithm that gives them an 'inside track' on the market and one hell of an advantage over everyone else.

or, in other words, Goldman-Sachs. so while Adams might sound a bit crazy...do some digging for yourselves. there are a couple players in the market who almost never lose a bet.

furiousxgeorge:I love Dilbert, but Adams being kind of an idiot is well known. He tried to troll Metafilter once pretending to be someone else because folks there were bashing him. He was called on it in one post.

He's also gone on some strange anti-women rants in the past couple of years. Not sure if he snapped, or was always like that, or money/fame went to his head, or what. Kind of lowered my once-high opinion of him.

commieprogressive:Weaver95: As near as Adams can tell, these manipulators have some kind of mind meld that lets them know exactly when to buy and sell stocks, en masse

not mind meld, just a series of dedicated computers and custom databases, along with a super secret proprietary algorithm that gives them an 'inside track' on the market and one hell of an advantage over everyone else.

or, in other words, Goldman-Sachs. so while Adams might sound a bit crazy...do some digging for yourselves. there are a couple players in the market who almost never lose a bet.

So just study it out?

i'm not saying GS is cheating but...they tend to make out very well in the market. not to mention they've got some very interesting friends in key places. I don't think i've ever seen them actually break any rules, but they walk pretty close to ethical violations on an almost daily basis.

His conspiracy theory is a rehash of how the psycho-econ model of basic human nature works. People tend to buy into what they believe is a good thing based on current performance (bet on the horse who is heading the race), and ignore or sell-off the performers that are lagging or are in a negative correction. Either way, they are allowing the emotional rather than intellectual side of investment to rule their investment strategy. Likewise, there are those who would engage in a more emotionally dettached form of investing by automatically setting aside investment funds year after year in the name of dollar- cost averaging. While more effective than engaging in emotional betting, dettached investment leaves one to the mercy of a market in decline, and may require years of reparation to recover. Then there are those who are able to overcome the emotional side of investment who are capable of reading a market mood fairly accurately buying into negative market corrections and under-performers and selling off when the market is telling them that this stock or investment can do no wrong.

My strategy is simple. Ignore my investments for years and then go batshiat crazy selling off on the bottom of a market correction. Probably not much different than millions of other investors these days.

way south:This.Even crazy people can be intuitive, and the stock market is a game played very well by a handful of powerful companies. Not so much by the average investor.Its not beyond reason that the big boys could take us for a ride to make themselves a great profit at everyone else's expense.

/its happened before, on smaller scales.

Hell, even that bashing of Jim Cramer on the Daily Show revealed that there are the 99% of the people who invest their money in 401k, and then there are the intelligent stock brokers who game the system. Government regulation can't keep up. It's like the social engineering equivalent of a security hole in software. The rich stock brokers siphon as much money as they can from these holes, until regulation plugs them up, and then they move on to five others they knew about decades ago.

Banks are the worst. Just look at the Libor scandal. Trillions of dollars of interest rate fixing, and they get a billion dollar fine? It's already got to the point that even the law can't touch these people.

Is there anything Scott Adams can't do? Mildly funny comics, awesome burritos, awesome house cobbler and now he rips the face off the vast stock market manipulation conspiracy like that one movie from the 80s where everybody had a really pretty face but was really a reptilian that was just wearing a mask + they ate birds.

On a serious note.. i doubt that he's wrong. Didn't major investment companies bundle and rebundle crap stocks and sell them to their own customers because they knew they were crap? And somehow Scott Adams is the crazy guy here? Even Alicia Keys has her moments.

Weaver95:As near as Adams can tell, these manipulators have some kind of mind meld that lets them know exactly when to buy and sell stocks, en masse

not mind meld, just a series of dedicated computers and custom databases, along with a super secret proprietary algorithm that gives them an 'inside track' on the market and one hell of an advantage over everyone else.

or, in other words, Goldman-Sachs. so while Adams might sound a bit crazy...do some digging for yourselves. there are a couple players in the market who almost never lose a bet.

yeah it's totally plausible. I don't know why the author dissed it so out of hand.unless the author works for Goldman too.

Lochsteppe:furiousxgeorge: I love Dilbert, but Adams being kind of an idiot is well known. He tried to troll Metafilter once pretending to be someone else because folks there were bashing him. He was called on it in one post.

He's also gone on some strange anti-women rants in the past couple of years. Not sure if he snapped, or was always like that, or money/fame went to his head, or what. Kind of lowered my once-high opinion of him.

Yeah, he strikes me as someone who assumes that because he's reasonably intelligent and knows a lot about one particular field (ie - drawing comics that office drones chuckle at), somehow that carries over into all fields. So he'll write an article about economics or politics or physics or something and spout a theory that, if you're ignorant of the field, sounds very persuasive, but if you have even a basic understanding of it is obvious nonsense. And then he gets all defensive and flustered when people point out that he clearly doesn't know WTF he's talking about.

I have no explanation for his "Obama hasn't done enough to legalize medical marijuana, therefore I'm voting for a candidate who will be even more hostile to it" bullshiat, though; that isn't even coherent enough to be wrong, it's just nonsensical.

He's not exactly Einstein & Minkowski rolled up into a single person; in fact, he's just a guy that draws sometimes funny, but obvious cartoons about an all too often typically dysfunctional engineering office.

I can relate to so many of those cartoons, and not just from one really dysfunctional job, but from several places I've worked during my career, most of which I think were pretty reasonable places.

I would guess it is one of two things: A heaping load of sarcasm, something Adams is well know for, or his butter pat has finally slipped off of the noodles.

No, he's serious. he seems to think that becasue he has some insightful and funny observations about the business world, that his other intellectual insights are equally cogent.This isn't the first time he's come out and said some remarkably stupid nonsese on a subject he knows absolutely nothing about.

Silverstaff:He's kind of used to this kind of commentary, since he even wrote a book about how he's a cartoonist getting his ass handed to him on a regular basis in discussions about involved in serious academic/economic/political matters a few years ago.

Yeah, he got tired of having his moronically stupid opinions torn to shreds by people know something about the subjects on which he opines. I recall some profoundly stupid bit about creationism a few years ago, which got pretty much completely shiat upon by a variety of science blogs. This was followed maybe a year later with some pondering on intelligent design that would have done his teachers proud - if he were a 14 year old homeschool student. The science blogs were, again, not so kind.

His not-so-funny advice to men's rights activists - that they shouldn't bother to argue with women for exactly the same reason you wouldn't argue with a four year old child or a retarded person - didn't go over too well with the feminist blogs. Nor did his subsequent appearance on at least one of those blogs to explain how they just weren't smart enough to understand what he really meant, and that while they were all acting angry, they all probably secretly agreed with him

His foray into discussing rape didn't fare well, either. I also seem to recall that his musings on Free Will were goddamned dumb, too. His takedown of atheism was just a simpletons regurgitation of Pascal's Wager

So I'm not really surprised by anything he says anymore. He's stupid, and he believes stupid things.

He's not exactly Einstein & Minkowski rolled up into a single person; in fact, he's just a guy that draws sometimes funny, but obvious cartoons about an all too often typically dysfunctional engineering office.

I can relate to so many of those cartoons, and not just from one really dysfunctional job, but from several places I've worked during my career, most of which I think were pretty reasonable places.

jjorsett:Everyone should ignore Adams and go back to listening to the latest viewpoints of Sean Penn and Sophia Vergara.

One of the things that is always amusing is when pundits tell their followers who it is the other side listens to. In this case, Sophia Vergara? What the hell has she to do with it? I bet she said something ridiculously stupid, the conservative Blog-Entertainment-Complex got a hold of it and presented it to their audience as not some idiot saying something stupid, but the totality of liberal thinking. It is not simply one of numerous tributaries dumping into the river of liberalism but its mouth and its totality.

Not that it doesn't happen for everyone else. It's just the convenient example here.

He reminds me of Orson Scott Card. I love the Ender's Game series, I love Dilbert comics, but the people behind them (Card and Adams) are both a little nutty, and shouldn't be taken seriously about things outside of their original works, ie, books and Dilbert.

vygramul:One of the things that is always amusing is when pundits tell their followers who it is the other side listens to. In this case, Sophia Vergara? What the hell has she to do with it? I bet she said something ridiculously stupid, the conservative Blog-Entertainment-Complex got a hold of it and presented it to their audience as not some idiot saying something stupid, but the totality of liberal thinking. It is not simply one of numerous tributaries dumping into the river of liberalism but its mouth and its totality.

I would guess it is one of two things: A heaping load of sarcasm, something Adams is well know for, or his butter pat has finally slipped off of the noodles.

No, he's serious. he seems to think that becasue he has some insightful and funny observations about the business world, that his other intellectual insights are equally cogent.This isn't the first time he's come out and said some remarkably stupid nonsese on a subject he knows absolutely nothing about.

Silverstaff: He's kind of used to this kind of commentary, since he even wrote a book about how he's a cartoonist getting his ass handed to him on a regular basis in discussions about involved in serious academic/economic/political matters a few years ago.

Yeah, he got tired of having his moronically stupid opinions torn to shreds by people know something about the subjects on which he opines. I recall some profoundly stupid bit about creationism a few years ago, which got pretty much completely shiat upon by a variety of science blogs. This was followed maybe a year later with some pondering on intelligent design that would have done his teachers proud - if he were a 14 year old homeschool student. The science blogs were, again, not so kind.

His not-so-funny advice to men's rights activists - that they shouldn't bother to argue with women for exactly the same reason you wouldn't argue with a four year old child or a retarded person - didn't go over too well with the feminist blogs. Nor did his subsequent appearance on at least one of those blogs to explain how they just weren't smart enough to understand what he really meant, and that while they were all acting angry, they all probably secretly agreed with him

His foray into discussing rape didn't fare well, either. I also seem to recall that his musings on Free Will were goddamned dumb, too. His takedown of atheism was just a simpletons regurgitation of Pascal's Wager

So I'm not really ...

He's the perfect example of how the ability to detect the wrong answer does not translate into the ability to calculate the right one.

Mrtraveler01:vygramul: One of the things that is always amusing is when pundits tell their followers who it is the other side listens to. In this case, Sophia Vergara? What the hell has she to do with it?

Is she the one on Modern Family with the thick accent?

And why am I supposed to care about Sean Penn again? I know the Conservatives blogs keep telling me I'm supposed to for whatever reason, but for the life of me, I can't figure out why.

Sean Penn's heyday was during the 1980s, which is the time of the Republicans' creation myth ("And the eternal Rea'Gonn did pluck a hair from its back and planted it in the fertile soil of Greede. It grew at once into a mewling babe which the Rea'Gonn did suckle at its teat"). Everything from that period is magnified in significance as a result. That's why so many Republicans wear parachute pants.

Simply do not sell your stocks when there is bad news. In the end you will be just as wealthy as the market manipulators. You're welcome.

Surely this is incorrect - you are doing better than the "sell low, buy high" small investors that jump on a trend just before it runs its course, but the putative theory is they get out of the market (or a particular stock) high, crash it with doomsday stories, then buy back in low - so they end up with the same share price at the end, but having cashed out the difference between the boom and bust price each time that works.

Not that I believe there is anything as organized as this going on, because such a well oil machine would end up with very rich players with lots of stock each that know when a given stock is going to crash, so they would all be tempted to jump before each other to avoid get caught out not being able to sell at the higher price, because the large scale selling of their co-conspirators would crash the price rapidly.

way south:Weaver95: As near as Adams can tell, these manipulators have some kind of mind meld that lets them know exactly when to buy and sell stocks, en masse

not mind meld, just a series of dedicated computers and custom databases, along with a super secret proprietary algorithm that gives them an 'inside track' on the market and one hell of an advantage over everyone else.

or, in other words, Goldman-Sachs. so while Adams might sound a bit crazy...do some digging for yourselves. there are a couple players in the market who almost never lose a bet.

This.Even crazy people can be intuitive, and the stock market is a game played very well by a handful of powerful companies. Not so much by the average investor.Its not beyond reason that the big boys could take us for a ride to make themselves a great profit at everyone else's expense.

Scott Adams is a quack. The best example of this was his Planned Chaos series of rants, but there have been others Many have been deleted (by him presumably) and it took the media in general, a bit of time to catch onto his game, so some things were never documented. However, the Planned Chaos series got enough attention to at least get him to calm down. Although it appears he is back on a rant.

To a limited extent he is correct. Large investment firms can take advantage of arbitrage trading in futures markets that is unavailable to the mom and pop investor or even smaller investment firms. As I recall, there is a building in New York that is wired with an assload of fiber and floors full of server solely to reduce the network latency while doing automated arbitrage trades.

Think about that for a moment. Arbitrage trades are being executed so rapidly and at such volume that your WoW ping time is an unacceptable delay.

homelessdude:Scott Adams is a quack. The best example of this was his Planned Chaos series of rants, but there have been others Many have been deleted (by him presumably) and it took the media in general, a bit of time to catch onto his game, so some things were never documented. However, the Planned Chaos series got enough attention to at least get him to calm down. Although it appears he is back on a rant.

I read his theory. Despite lacking evidence, there's nothing crazy about it. It seems perfectly plausible... nothing about mindmelds in there. I have no idea why the huffington post ridiculed it. The truth is, all the big players have custom software that automatically buy/sells and operates on millesecond margins. It's not exactly insane to think they all have triggers watching for what the other big players' software is doing.

Monkeyhouse Zendo:To a limited extent he is correct. Large investment firms can take advantage of arbitrage trading in futures markets that is unavailable to the mom and pop investor or even smaller investment firms. As I recall, there is a building in New York that is wired with an assload of fiber and floors full of server solely to reduce the network latency while doing automated arbitrage trades.

Think about that for a moment. Arbitrage trades are being executed so rapidly and at such volume that your WoW ping time is an unacceptable delay.

If arbitrage trades weren't money for the big guys, there would be no money in infrastructure, but there is.

The low-profile project turned out to have a high-profile backer: Jim Barksdale, former chief executive of Internet browser company Netscape, one of the highfliers of the dot-com boom. In 2010, he unveiled the fruits of his labors, dubbing the company Spread Networks. At an estimated cost of $300 million, Mr. Barksdale had forged a new cable route between Chicago and New Jersey that shortened by three milliseconds the length of time it took for a pulse of light traveling through glass to make a round trip between the two points.

For traders using high-powered computers to profit from the interplay between Chicago's commodity markets and New York City's stock exchanges, those three milliseconds were worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Mr. Barksdale argued.Market observers say Mr. Barksdale will need to command high premiums to justify his project's cost. As new technology increases the capacity of existing fiber, the wholesale cost of transmitting data between Chicago and New York has dropped 89% since 2005, TeleGeography says. In an interview, Mr. Barksdale's son David Barksdale, chief executive of Spread Networks, wouldn't discuss his project's cost or financial returns but said he hadn't yet sold all his capacity.

Monkeyhouse Zendo:DO NOT WANT Poster Girl: If arbitrage trades weren't money for the big guys, there would be no money in infrastructure, but there is.

Can you expand on what you mean by "no money in infrastructure"?

"At an estimated cost of $300 million, Mr. Barksdale had forged a new cable route between Chicago and New Jersey that shortened by three milliseconds the length of time it took for a pulse of light traveling through glass to make a round trip between the two points."

Well, anything that is 'no money in infrastructure' is private investment money not being spent like this:

Money in infrastructure: $300,000,000/3ms/700 miles

$100,000,000/ms/700 miles ~ $143000/mi/ms ~$143,000,000 per mile per second.